Motherland

by Maria Hummel

  “I’m going upstairs,” Liesl said. “And I’m going to talk to them both. About the lead.” She turned away, then paused. “And I don’t want anyone to know about me contacting Frank. Not even the boys. I told Ani I was writing to my aunt. To ask if we can visit.”

  “Go visit. Get far away from Frankfurt. Get away from any city,” said Uta. “And take the corset, for Frank’s sake. It’ll lift your breasts up into sweet little loaves.”

  Liesl made a grimace, but she grabbed the lingerie. As she turned away, she thought she heard a creak somewhere in the cellar.

  “Who’s there?” she asked, her eyes adjusting to the gloom of the coal cellar, the family’s shelter, the hole to the Geiss house. She couldn’t see anything but the shadows of shelves, and when she reached the stairs, they were empty.

  Neither of the boys seemed to understand the news at first. Hans seemed angry for some reason, and Ani looked at her with a puzzled face, as if she were explaining some complex mathematical equation. But when she announced that if Ani didn’t improve in the next two weeks, the doctor wanted to send him away, Ani’s face crumpled and he wailed like a baby. Hans shot up from the sofa and started flinging wood into the stove.

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

  “It’s not me,” said Liesl.

  “You want him to be sent away,” Hans said, his lower lip extending. “And me, too. You want to be alone with my little brother.”

  “Hans. Watch your mouth,” Liesl snapped, but she felt tears blistering in the corners of her eyes.

  “I don’t want to gooooo.” Ani’s wailing woke Jürgen, who began his own complaint from the other room, and then Frau Dillman knocked on her floor to protest the noise, which made the baby cry louder.

  “I don’t want to g-g-o,” Ani said as Liesl rushed to the study to scoop up Jürgen.

  “Would you please and forever stop being a baby,” Hans said.

  “I don’t want to g-g-go,” Ani sobbed.

  “Then tell us what you ate, so we can tell the doctor, and all of this can be over,” Liesl said when she came back into the room, patting and shushing.

  For a moment, Ani’s face opened, but then he glanced at Hans, and his expression shut again. “I didn’t eat anything,” he said with lowered brows. “I didn’t.”

  “Ani,” Hans said. “Just tell, or they’re going to send you away.”

  Jürgen squirmed to get down and began to crawl across the floor toward his oldest brother’s feet.

  “Tell us now, Ani,” Liesl insisted. Uta’s advice flashed in her mind, and she reached for Ani’s shoulders. What kind of mother couldn’t get the truth from her own child? If Ani just told, the doctor would trust her. Her fingers tightened over his bony arms.

  Ani cowered, blocking his head with his hands. “I didn’t eat anything,” he whimpered. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” shouted Hans.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the baby watching her uncertainly. Jürgen’s lower lip began to tremble. Her resolve died. She couldn’t do it.

  “Then I want us to search this apartment together. Every inch,” she declared with hollow conviction. “And then I’m finding another doctor.”

  “I don’t want to go to another doctor,” said Ani.

  “Our father is a doctor,” Hans said. “He’d never send Ani away.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” said Liesl. “I’m writing to ask him to—to contact Dr. Becker.” She wiped the wet corners of her eyes.

  Hans seemed surprised by her tears and averted his gaze. When Jürgen reached him, Hans lifted him up, looking so much like his father in the motion of his body, the tenderness of his hands.

  We need you. Liesl thought. All of us.

  Jürgen smiled at Hans, but then he looked around anxiously for her.

  “You’re my brother,” Hans said, jostling the frowning baby. “Why can’t I hold you?”

  Two days passed. Berlin was on fire. Ordinarily Liesl could shove the air raids on other cities to one painful corner of her mind, but with Uta in the house, glued to the radio, moaning and shaking her head, the destruction punctuated every hour. The Reich Chancellery was burning. St. Michael’s Church had been bombed to a broken shell. The street of linden trees in Uta’s old neighborhood was a sea of bricks and branches.

  And through all this, no word from Frank. Liesl was sure that his silence meant that he hadn’t gotten a furlough. He must be intending to desert. Or perhaps the telegram had never reached him?

  She opened an atlas and looked up Kiedrich and Hadamar, the towns that Dr. Becker had mentioned. Less than fifty kilometers away. Too close. Her dread increased.

  The doctor from Hadamar had visited the Hartwald Spa in early 1940—she remembered because it was the winter that Uta had started singing at the spa after lunch, and while she was waiting for Uta to begin, Liesl had overhead the conference next door through the thin walls.

  So often the meetings in the spa’s private room were military in nature—this or that campaign, the giant oak table overflowing with maps and atlases, the names of Ukrainian mountains, Balkan towns. Liesl was so accustomed to tuning out these conversations that she heard the name “Hadamar” several times before she realized the man was talking about the city near Limburg. And he was talking about children. The hope that he might be some bigwig in education made her drift closer, peeking through a crack in the wall to get a good look at him. She harbored dreams of getting her teacher certificate and running her own kindergarten one day. Powerful men came to the spa. Perhaps this one could help her get a scholarship.

  The man at the front of the room was tall and almost bald, with an unsmiling mouth and dark eyebrows that arched sharply downward. With expressionless eyes, he rattled off a set of figures about the cost of long-term mental patient care in the current German system. Two words stuck out to her. He said them often, and each time with a kind of detached pity, the way one might talk about a hopelessly broken machine.

  Minderwertiger Kinder. Inferior children.

  Liesl watched, transfixed, as he turned on a projector and showed his film of the boy with the fish feet and the toothy blank-eyed girl. The twisted human visages made the viewers grunt and look away. Matches flared as the officers lit cigarettes. The movie went to a black screen with the word “Hadamar,” and then a camera revealed a long ward filled with beds, a tall brick building with arching windows.

  Hadamar was not a school. The man was not an education official.

  Herr Doktor? someone said, and queried about the likelihood of parents releasing their children to the state asylum for treatment.

  The doctor smoothed his tie. A questionnaire is being prepared that will soon go out to all public health officials and mental institutions. A qualified team will evaluate the answers and determine which patients must be admitted and which terminated.

  But what about the parents? the questioner persisted. Surely some will protest.

  Irritation flashed across the doctor’s face. Procedures will be implemented to ensure parental compliance.

  Liesl pulled back from the crack and strode away. She found a table close to the stage and listened with fierce concentration to Uta’s songs, hearing her friend’s sensuous phrasing, every flat and sharp note. Liesl stuffed herself on Sachertorte. Everyone understood that the Reich’s future depended on a strong and able population. These decisions about human potential were best left to Germany’s superior doctors. Yet Liesl couldn’t help feeling as if someone or something were following her all day. Whenever she looked back, she saw blank sunlight.

  Hadamar. She vaguely remembered the bishop of Limburg later protesting the euthanizing of patients at the institution, and that the deaths had been officially stopped by Hitler’s own orders. But what had they done to those poor children in the film? She would never hand Ani over.

  Unable to sit still, even at night, Liesl wandered dry-eyed and cold through the apartment after the boys an
d Uta were asleep. She plucked up pillows. She looked behind curtains. She searched the cellar, staring into the sauerkraut vat, wishing it could tell her what secrets it had heard. She told herself that she was still looking for whatever lead Ani had eaten, but she also peeked in high places where he could not reach, and cleaned dust off the curving moldings with her finger. She stood on the black velvet cushions of Susi’s Biedermeier chairs to reach even higher. She shook out all the fabrics, the rugs, the curtains, speckling the moonlit snow with dirt. She washed the walls one night, all the way to the ceiling, watching the clear water run over the back of her hand.

  Her nocturnal activities made her tired and cross with everyone: the baby for tearing apart a bookshelf and scattering the volumes all over the floor; Hans for abandoning his brothers to play with the Dillman and Winter children; Uta for telling Liesl again that she allowed the boys to run all over her, why didn’t she just lay down the law? Only Ani escaped Liesl’s ire. He’d become almost heartwrenchingly obedient, his blond head appearing at her elbow every morning, asking how he could help her that day, and she’d think, There is nothing wrong with this child. Yet later she would find him in the kitchen, begging some invisible person not to lock him up, or at the stove, trying to melt an iron pan to make shackles for his ankles, and she just wanted to fold him into her arms and fix him with all the love she had.

  The second opinion confirmed Ani’s lab results. Although the other doctor was kind to Liesl and Ani, he seemed unwilling to contradict Dr. Becker.

  “Dr. Becker has the best psychiatry expertise in Hannesburg,” he said nervously. “I’m sorry,” he added, and rubbed his bald head.

  “What do you know about this Kiedrich asylum?”

  The doctor leaned forward, lowering his voice. “My advice—Keep the boy out of the state system altogether. All the institutions around here are funnels to Hadamar.”

  “What happens at Hadamar?”

  The doctor opened the drawer to his desk and shut it again. “I’m sorry. I have too many other patients waiting.” He called to his receptionist.

  “But what am I supposed to do?” Liesl said.

  He sighed. “Hide him. Take him to the country.”

  The country. Just the thought of seeing a farm again made Liesl’s heart lift a little. Although Hannesburg had no strategic importance, it could become a target anyway. And yet she couldn’t send Ani alone, and how would she get any news to or from Frank if they all left home? How could she decide without him?

  Surely the asylum wouldn’t admit Ani if he improved. The boy was eating well now, and his color was coming back. If his numbers went down, Dr. Becker would have to rip up his form and let them go home. Wouldn’t he?

  If, then. These bargains she played with herself. She’d been playing them for years. As if she were the one who held the power, and not him, and not them—the state she’d once worshipped because it had paved over the ache of her homesickness and orphanhood, because it had justified her running away from home, from a conventional life, to be an independent woman.

  Motherless, fatherless, Liesl had woken every morning in that first year at the spa, lifted her eyes to the Führer’s portrait hanging at the Kinderhaus, and pledged him her service. In return, his kind brown eyes offered her protection and a kind of benevolent severity. I trust you to be a good girl, he seemed to say. To keep your virtue. And she had, knitting socks for his soldiers, nurturing his officers’ children, watching and nodding at anti-Bolshevist films in the evening.

  She couldn’t name the day it started to change—maybe the afternoon she’d met Frank, or maybe eavesdropping on the Hadamar doctor, or maybe when the quiet, gentle piano player disappeared because he was rumored to have Jewish blood. Maybe it was the first air raid siren, or the tenth. Her pride started to leak away and in its place grew fear. She wasn’t afraid of getting caught—no, her papers were good, her reputation spotless. Her days passed in the same old way, with the same three meals: a common breakfast and Mittagessen with the spa staff, a lonely evening supper in her room. At night, a book, or rarely, when Uta prevailed, dancing with the officers. The Führer still watched over her, but his mouth looked downcast, then cruel.

  Then, at some point after 1940, after Paris fell and London was burning, a new kind of etiquette swept through them all like a chilly wind. Suddenly trust and good faith were out of fashion, and it was more seemly to be careful about what you said and to whom you said it. Imperceptibly, Liesl’s anxiety deepened, worsened as the Wehrmacht began to lose instead of win, as more citizens were drafted to military projects in the east, and gaunt, dull-eyed gangs of political prisoners fixed the streets. By 1944, everyone was sure the spa would close, the staff deployed elsewhere, back to Berlin, off to factories. A wrong word might get you a bad assignment. Liesl found her eyes shifting from side to side as she spoke, checking to see who was listening. Her spine stiffened and it hurt sometimes to bend to pull on her stockings. Uta planned to go to the capital, to get a job in an officers’ club. Come with me, she’d begged. You can get work as a typist. And Liesl had agreed, until the evening Frank, widowed two months, had walked through the door of the Kinderhaus with his wilting bouquet of violets.

  If, then. If Frank never came home, then what would she do now?

  That night Liesl dreamed of standing alone under a night sky, facing a black hillside. The whole world was behind her, silent, deserted, destroyed. Only the hill was alive. Tall, stalk-like flowers bloomed all over it. They had been burned to a crisp.

  You must speak for us, they rattled at her.

  She held her hands over her ears, thinking, Leave me alone.

  She woke the next morning relieved to let the day’s routines take over. First stop, a tiptoe downstairs to fetch Jürgen’s milk, without alerting Frau Winter and inviting a new barrage of advice. She opened the icebox door, noting that the Dillmans had somewhere procured eggs and butter and had not shared the information. She noted that the Winters had left their dirty pots in the sink again. She poured Jürgen’s bottle, set it in a pan on the stove to warm, then added some sticks to the fire.

  A board squeaked and she spun to see Hans creeping out of the cellar. His cheeks were pink and he didn’t look sleepy at all.

  “It’s early to be up,” she observed.

  He grunted and grabbed a heel of rye from the bread box, wolfing it down.

  “What were you doing down there anyway?” she demanded. “Are the Winters down there, too?”

  “No.”

  “The Dillman girls?”

  “I was sleeping,” he said, his voice high and defensive. “Sometimes I sleep down there.”

  “You’ll catch your death. It’s freezing.” She reached over and touched his hands. They were hot. He looked away.

  “Hans, was someone else in the cellar?” Those Dillman girls. It had to be.

  Hans didn’t answer. One of his cheeks was brighter than the other, flushed all the way across the bone. He bit and chewed, staring into the space between her waist and his body.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” said Liesl. “Who was in the cellar?”

  He finished the crust and wiped his hands on his trousers. “I told you,” he said. “No one.”

  “All right,” said Liesl. “I’ll ask Herr Geiss if he’s heard anything.”

  Hans’s head shot up. His eyes burned into her now.

  Not the Dillmans. The realization spread. Was it possible? Berte Geiss was eighteen. Hans wasn’t even ten yet.

  “Hans,” she said gently. “Are you—”

  Just then Frau Winter entered the kitchen, humming one of her tuneless songs. “Your milk is boiling over,” she said.

  Liesl lifted the pan and whacked it down on an unlit burner.

  “Can I go?” Hans snarled.

  She felt Frau Winter’s eyes on her, judging the mutinous tone of her son. “No,” said Liesl. “You’re going to stay within my sight for the rest of this week. No trips upstairs or downstairs, and
Fräulein Müller will run the errands.”

  “That’s not fair!” shouted Hans.

  Frau Winter regarded them with keen interest as Hans ran for the door. Liesl grabbed his arm but he twisted away and bolted up the stairs.

  “You know what I do?” said Frau Winter as Liesl poured the milk, wincing as the glass burned her fingertips. It was too hot.

  From the rooms above she heard Jürgen begin to cry.

  “No,” Liesl snapped. She topped off the bottle with cold milk from the icebox. Was it still too hot? She couldn’t tell.

  “I think they are running around and around because they are looking for their father,” said Frau Winter. “And they can’t find him anywhere.”

  Their father. She tested the milk with her finger. She couldn’t tell.

  The baby’s cry shook her skull.

  “And so I tell them that Führer is their father. The Führer is watching them,” Frau Winter said from behind her. “Because maybe they aren’t scared of me. But they are always scared of him.”

  Liesl ran up the steps, cupping the bottle’s rim, wishing she’d brought the nipple to seal it. The white liquid sloshed. Jürgen wanted milk exactly the heat of a body. He recognized that heat though he had never fed from his mother’s breast. She heard Hans’s voice inside, then Uta’s.

  What would Frank do about Hans’s lying and sneaking around with that girl?

  Not girl. Woman. Hans was ten years old.

  The stove door slammed, the latch rattling into place. Jürgen cried louder.

  “Those peasants and their hamstern,” Frau Winter called after her, holding up old, soft rutabagas in both fists. “They’re hoarding everything. Eating their bacon while we starve in the cities.”